Energy-conserving reception protocols for mobile ad hoc networks

The importance of conserving the limited battery energy available in mobile tactical communication systems is well appreciated in their design. Radio transceivers are major energy consumers in such systems, however fundamental advancements to increase battery capacity and/or reduce transceiver power requirements are not expected in the near future; therefore, energy-conserving techniques are the main avenue for extending system life. In this paper, we propose a suite of reception protocols that support episodic powering down of the radio receiver during periods of low communication activity. The suite covers a range of varying implementation complexion, control-traffic overhead, and energy-saving capability, thus an appropriate solution can be selected according to the particular tactical application. The protocols are considered in the framework of asynchronous (e.g. CSMA) channel access but can be easily adapted to synchronous channel access methods as well. We evaluate the performance of two protocols from the suite in the context of a proactive link-state routing protocol and show that they are capable of significantly reducing energy consumption with little additional complexity and acceptable performance penalties.